TEACHER’S GUIDE TO HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2002. (includes free copy of ‘Britain and the Holocaust’ by David Cesarani). Holocaust Educational Trust pound;5 www.het.org.uk HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY FLASHCARDS. HMD Educational Working Group. Free from www.hmd.gov.uk REFLECTIONS: A cross-curricular resource pack for teaching the Holocaust. By Paul Salmons. pound;30 (or by mail order on 01223 499 345, plus pound;2.50 pamp;p). TORN APART: a Student’s Guide to the Holocaust Exhibition. By Paul Salmons. pound;2.50 or pound;1.95 each for class sets of 25 or more (or by mail order, plus pound;1 pamp;p). Imperial War Museum: www.iwm.org.uk
For many years in this country the defining image of the Holocaust was of British soldiers being greeted by the tearful, emaciated inmates of Bergen-Belsen at its liberation in 1945. But there was an irony here: by SS standards the regime at Belsen was mild until the last months of the war, when it was overwhelmed by the “death marches” of prisoners being moved from other camps to escape the advancing allies.
By contrast, the extermination camps in the east were little known about until the 1960s and 1970s. Britain’s ambivalent response to the Holocaust is the theme of the second Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27.
To mark the occasion, the Holocaust Educational Trust has produced a revised edition of David Cesarani’s Britain and the Holocaust. It surveys Britain’s uneasy relationship with Jewish people, from medieval persecution, to the refusal of post-war banks to release the property of Holocaust survivors, or the reluctance to prosecute Nazi war criminals during the Cold War.
The Teacher’s Guide uses “Thoughts for the Day” to generate discussion on themes such as how much Britain knew, or on prejudice against refugees, then and now.
The Department for Education and Skills has produced a particularly good - and free - set of 12 flashcards aimed at key stages 2 and 3 for Holocaust Memorial Day. They focus on less well-known angles, such as the orphaned “boys” (some of them girls) who were resettled in Britain after the war. Other genocides are here, too: the Roma, Armenians and Tutsis.
The Imperial War Museum has produced an excellent pack to accompany its Holocaust exhibition, with flashcards, OHP transparencies, and a CD-Rom with country-by-country details and harrowing audio recordings of survivors’ testimony.
The cross-curricular lesson plans and teaching ideas include citizenship. The excellent teaching notes will reassure any teacher uncertain of how to approach this highly sensitive subject. Particularly thought-provoking are an RS section on “Where was God in the Holocaust?”, and a section for English teachers on Holocaust language - a “dentist” was a prisoner detailed to pull gold teeth from the mouths of corpses, while “chimney fodder” is chillingly self-explanatory. Testimony on the CD explains why learning the language could be the difference between life or death.
Some of the most important sections consider the type of people who carried out the killings: flashcards show Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second-in-command, playing on the beach with his children, and the smiling girl in the glamour photo is the sadistic concentration camp guard Irma Grese. There is even the case of an SS officer who got into trouble with his superiors because he so enjoyed shooting prisoners that he took photos and sent them to his wife and friends. What sort of people were theyI just like us?
Sean Lang teaches history at Hills Road sixth form college, Cambridge
